I turned the small black knob to the right, feeling its ridged texture with my finger and thumb.
The microfilm reader whirred into action, gears inside spinning rapidly. I watched the words and images from the newspaper I was searching through whiz by in a complete blur. I was looking for an article from a particular year—let’s call it 1975.
Amid the smell of books (mostly good) and intense quiet, also sat state-of-the-art research machines, humming from time to time as users went on little quests for information.
With each little turn of the knob, I was closer to finding my article, until I overshot my target. With a sigh, I adjusted my approach, gently coaxing the knob in the opposite direction, attempting to circle back to the elusive September 1975 section of articles.
Once you found the year, you needed to start turning the other (slower) knob, steadily oscillating too far backward, then too far forward, until you found the piece you were looking for.
This was Googling in the 1980s. This was state of the art.
It was an exercise in patience.
Even once I had found the article I was after, my work was hardly done. The next step in this quest was to read the entire thing, so that I could determine if the article actually had the information I was looking for.
This video from 1981 is gold. It shows how things were before the advent of microfilm and microfiche, and how hot and sexy miniaturization was.
The roots of this bleeding edge 80s tech (microfilm) go back surprisingly far.
The desire to preserve knowledge goes back at least tens of thousands of years, to our earliest visual art (and probably much longer), but our story really begins with miniaturization.
Because it was impractical to travel long distances with heavy books, compact tiny scrolls had long been employed, but these were incredible feats of craftsmanship—not common at all. Not only was it impractical to try to write that small, it was often even more difficult to read what was written, at least until the microscope became more common during the 18th century.
Then, photography changed everything. Suddenly, you could capture incredible detail faithfully, and at a tiny scale.
Photography's ability to shrink documents while preserving clarity and detail was a modern marvel. This new era of miniaturization was not just about saving space; it was about redefining how we store and access the vast expanse of human knowledge.
Thus, by the time microfilm readers were whirring in the libraries of the 1980s, they were not just representing a modern convenience; they were the culmination of centuries-long efforts to condense, preserve, and democratize access to information.
This was a quantum leap upward in terms of searching for and finding information. Imagine trying to do serious research before microfilm and microfiche. You might spend a day gathering several of those giant books that collected newspapers or magazines, and then spend another day finding the articles, and perhaps a third day combing through every article for whatever information you’re looking for.
Microfilm dropped this entire process to less than a day, but it seems quaint to us today, doesn’t it? If you want to find out whether something happened at a given time or not, you can google it. Within a few microseconds, you can have a list of dozens of pages (articles, essentially) that contain your phrase. Seconds later, you can have several tabs open for reading. And, “CNTRL + F” lets you find text on the page instantly, so you can simply search for the specific words within the article.
What took days, now takes minutes. And, that’s not even mentioning generative AI, which can give you a much more direct answer in a fraction of the time googling takes.
Let’s allow that observation to linger for just a moment.
What took days, now takes seconds.
I’ve tried to paint this picture in broad strokes for you—how document miniaturization took a leap upward with the microscope, then another leap with photography, and how microfilm sped the research process up from days to hours. Now, we’ve seen hours reduced to minutes or seconds.
Getting information takes the tiniest fraction of time that it took when I was born. What will it look like decades from now, and what do all of these rapid changes mean?
That’s what I’m here to talk with you about. Share your thoughts with me and with other readers, and let’s think about this today.
Today we have the exact opposite problem: information overload. There's so much of it, instantly accessible, that the challenge becomes sorting through it and figuring out what's actually worthy of attention. That goes right back to your other post about the paradox of choice.
Perhaps dedicating yourself for three days to find a specific piece of information makes you appreciate it that much more.
Working with the microfiche machines was one of the pleasures I found in one of my library jobs.